Guernica
1937 · Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid
A screaming horse, a mother with her dead child, all in grey. Picasso painted it in weeks after German bombers leveled a Basque town.
★ 9.9
Browse by time · century
20th century
1901 – 2000
Showing 162 artworks from the 20th century
Fountain
1917
Duchamp submitted a porcelain urinal signed R. Mutt to an exhibition he was helping to judge, and the committee rejected it.
★ 9.5
Water Lilies (Nympheas Cycle)
1926 · Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris
Monet painted these eight murals of his pond for two oval rooms in Paris while his eyesight failed. They opened months after he died.
★ 9.5
The Thinker
1904 · Musee Rodin, Paris
Rodin first made this figure as Dante brooding over the Gates of Hell, then enlarged him and set him thinking alone on a rock.
★ 9.3
The Girls of Avignon
1907 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Five nude women stare out with their faces turned into masks, and Picasso kept the canvas rolled up in his studio for years.
★ 9.2
Nighthawks
1942 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Four people sit under fluorescent light behind a curved sheet of glass, and Hopper gave the diner no door in or out.
★ 8.9
The Kiss (Klimt)
1908 · Galerie Belvedere, Vienna
Two lovers kneel wrapped in a single gold robe, rectangles patterning his side of it and circles hers, on a meadow of flowers.
★ 8.9
Campbell's Soup Cans
1962 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Thirty-two canvases, one for every variety Campbell's then sold, hung in a row like stock on a supermarket shelf.
★ 8.8
The Persistence of Memory
1931 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Dalí said the soft watches came to him from a camembert melting in the sun, and he painted them with hallucinatory precision.
★ 8.7
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
1950 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Pollock worked on the floor and moved around the canvas instead of standing at an easel, laying black enamel across raw cotton in 1950.
★ 8.6
Bird in Space
1928 · Museum of Modern Art, New York
American customs taxed it as industrial metal until Brancusi v. United States in 1928 forced the law to recognize abstract sculpture as art.
★ 8.6
The Dance (Matisse)
1909 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Five figures wheel in a ring against blue and green, reduced to three colors and the strain of holding hands at speed.
★ 8.5
Black Square
1915 · Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Malevich hung it high in the corner where a Russian house keeps its icons, and called it the zero of form.
★ 8.5
Mystery and Melancholy of a Street
1914 · Private collection
A girl rolls a hoop down an arcaded street toward a shadow coming around the corner, in light that belongs to no hour.
★ 8.3
American Gothic
1930 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Wood posed his sister and his dentist in front of a farmhouse window, and people have argued ever since whether he meant tribute or mockery.
★ 8.3
The Joy of Life
1906 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
Nudes lounge and pipe and dance in a ring in a glade of colors nothing in nature has, a Fauve idyll from 1906.
★ 8.3
The Dream
1910 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Rousseau painted this in the last year of his life and explained that the woman on the sofa is dreaming herself into the jungle.
★ 8.3
The Bathers
1906 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Cézanne worked on it for years and died before he finished, bending the trees inward so they rhyme with the bodies underneath.
★ 8.2
Walking Man I
1960 · Fondation Giacometti, Paris
Everything is scraped off the bronze except forward motion. One cast briefly held the record for the most expensive sculpture ever sold.
★ 8.1
Composition VII
1913 · Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Kandinsky made more than thirty studies for this and then painted the four-meter canvas in three days, apocalypse dissolved past recognition.
★ 8.1
Marilyn Diptych
1962 · Tate Modern, London
Warhol silkscreened a publicity photo fifty times just after Monroe died, bright on one half and smudging away to nothing on the other.
★ 8.0
Portrait of Adele Block Bauer
1907 · Neue Galerie, New York City
Only the face and hands are painted naturally and the rest is gold. The Nazis seized it, and a long restitution case eventually got it back.
★ 8.0
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
1944 · Tate Modern, London
Three flayed creatures crane and scream on orange grounds. Shown as the war ended in 1945, they made Bacon's reputation overnight.
★ 8.0
Number 11, 1952 (Blue Poles)
1952 · National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Eight ragged dark blue poles lean across the poured web and give it a beat. Australia's purchase in 1973 caused a national row.
★ 8.0
Nude Descending a Staircase
1912 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
A critic at the 1913 Armory Show called it an explosion in a shingle factory, and the insult followed the painting around America.
★ 8.0
The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe)
1929 · LACMA, Los Angeles
The words under the pipe are correct, since a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, which is the whole and entire joke.
★ 7.9
Rothko Chapel murals
1967 · Rothko Chapel, Houston
Fourteen near-black panels in an octagonal room, where your eyes adjusting to the dark is the point. Rothko died before it opened.
★ 7.9
Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
1953 · Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines
Bacon took Velázquez's composed pope and set him screaming behind a curtain of falling paint. He never saw the original in person.
★ 7.8
Woman with a Hat
1905 · San Francisco MOMA, San Francisco
A critic looked at this and called Matisse and his friends fauves, wild beasts, which is how the movement got its name.
★ 7.8
The Song of Love
1914 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A marble head, a red rubber glove and a green ball hang together on a wall, and a train goes by in the distance.
★ 7.8
The Old Guitarist
1904 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
The guitar is the only warm note in the picture. Picasso painted it in his Blue Period, poor himself and living on very little.
★ 7.8
Three Musicians
1921 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A harlequin, a Pierrot and a monk in flat interlocking shapes that look cut from paper. Synthetic Cubism at its grandest and most deadpan.
★ 7.8
Broadway Boogie Woogie
1943 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Mondrian broke his own grid into blinking squares after moving to New York, where he loved the traffic and the jazz.
★ 7.7
Woman I
1950 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
De Kooning dragged the figure back into abstract painting at the moment that was least acceptable, and worked this canvas over for two years.
★ 7.7
The Two Fridas
1939 · Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City), Mexico City
Two versions of herself hold hands with one artery running between them, clamped shut. She painted it as her marriage to Rivera fell apart.
★ 7.7
The Snake Charmer
1907 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A black silhouette plays a flute and the snakes come out of the leaves toward the music, in moonlight Rousseau invented entirely.
★ 7.6
Family of Saltimbanques
1905 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Circus people stand together in an empty landscape without looking at each other. The Rose Period at its largest and most wistful.
★ 7.5
The Weeping Woman
1937 · Tate Modern, London
Picasso pulled her out of the screaming mother in Guernica and gave her the face of Dora Maar, his lover and a photographer.
★ 7.5
Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red
1942 · Tate Modern, London
Black lines, white ground, three primary colors and nothing else. Mondrian spent decades taking painting down to this and called it Neo-Plasticism.
★ 7.5
Whaam!
1963 · Tate Modern, London
Lichtenstein blew a single war-comic panel up to mural scale across two canvases, Ben-Day dots, caption box and all.
★ 7.5